Amazon literally wants to enter into your house and now it controls the front door too.

The American government should be thrilled about this one, as not only that Amazon put a speaker that listens to what you are saying, it can even unlock the doors and have a surveillance too.

Ring made a good product for US homes but not so much for apartments and failed in our eyes with a subscription cloud base business model. People simply didn’t want to pay extra for that, but Amazon will most likely include this under its future Prime umbrella.

A Ring connected doorbell helps Amazon support its IoT dominance in the US market. The company has made a lot of impact with its Alexa based eco system. Amazon already bought Blink - the connected camera manufacturer - in December.

Bezos gets it. Amazon failed on mobile phones, but he did get the importance of ecosystem control and managed to jump on the competition with its Alexa powered ecosystem. Amazon Key can even unlock your doors via a Yale lock. This company is owned by one of the market leaders Assa Abloy. Back in October, one of the lock manufacturers Assa Abloy acquired “smart lock” maker August.

Amazon could not snap up everything, but at least it made a very good partnership with people who wanted to be part of the Amazon ecosystem.

This is not the end of consolidation, there will be more acquisitions.

Security outfit Gemalto has just released a survey which says that 90 percent of consumers lack confidence in the security of Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

The survey showed that two thirds of consumers and almost 80 percent of organisations support governments getting involved in setting IoT security because they did not trust manufacturers to protect them.

Gemalto Data Protection CTO Jason Hart said it was clear that both consumers and businesses have serious concerns around IoT security and little confidence that IoT service providers and device manufacturers will be able to protect IoT devices and more importantly the integrity of the data created, stored and transmitted by these devices,.

"With legislation like GDPR showing that governments are beginning to recognize the threats and long-lasting damage cyber-attacks can have on everyday lives, they now need to step up when it comes to IoT security. Until there is confidence in IoT amongst businesses and consumers, it won't see mainstream adoption."

Consumers' main fear - cited by two thirds of respondents - was hackers taking control of their device. In fact, this was more of a concern than their data being leaked (60 percent) and hackers accessing their personal information (54 percent). Despite more than half (54 percent) of consumers owning an IoT device (on average two), just 14 percent believe that they are extremely knowledgeable when it comes to the security of these devices, showing education is needed among both consumers and businesses.

In terms of the level of investment in security, the survey found that IoT device manufacturers and service providers spend just 11 percent of their total IoT budget on securing their IoT devices. The study found that these companies do recognise the importance of protecting devices and the data they generate or transfer with half of companies adopting a security by design approach. Two thirds of organizations report encryption as their main method of securing IoT assets with 62 percent encrypting the data as soon as it reaches their IoT device, while 59 percent as it leaves the device. Ninety two percent of companies also see an increase in sales or product usage after implementing IoT security measures.

According to the survey, businesses are in favour of regulations to make it clear who is responsible for securing IoT devices and data at each stage of its journey (61 percent) and the implications of non- compliance (55 percent). Almost every organization (96 percent) and consumer (90 percent) wanted government-enforced IoT security regulation.

Encouragingly, businesses are twigging that they need support in understanding IoT technology and are turning to partners to help, with cloud service providers (52 percent) and IoT service providers (50 percent) the favored options. When asked why, the top reason was a lack of expertise and skills (47 percent), followed by help in facilitating and speeding up their IoT deployment (46 percent).

Hart said: "The lack of knowledge among both the business and consumer worlds is quite worrying and it's leading to gaps in the IoT ecosystem that hackers will exploit."

"Within this ecosystem, there are four groups involved - consumers, manufacturers, cloud service providers and third parties - all of which have a responsibility to protect the data. 'Security by design' is the most effective approach to mitigate against a breach. Furthermore, IoT devices are a portal to the wider network and failing to protect them is like leaving your door wide open for hackers to walk in. Until both sides increase their knowledge of how to protect themselves and adopt industry standard approaches, IoT will continue to be a treasure trove of opportunity for hackers."

Microsoft has joined a long list of vendors supporting smart talking speakers. The marriage with the famous Harman Kardon manufacturer created a Cortana powered speaker called Invoke.

The Invoke is available today and it sells for $199. The speaker promises Cortana answers on some questions you ask, such as Skye integration, phone calls as well as premium 360 degrees sound. The Harman Kardon make incorporates three woofers, three tweeters, and two passive radiators for the best sound in that form factor. You will be able to play music with voice commands but it remains to be seen how well it will work.

Microsoft did a smart thing and expanded its support across devices and operating systems. You will be able to set a reminder to your Windows 10 powered notebook / surface / desktop or Android powered smartphone. It should work on iPhones too, but that's unclear at this stage.

You can make and receive calls with Skype but of course, since the speaker doesn’t have a camera or display it will be a voice only feature. It will even throw in free Skype calling from the US to mobile phones and landlines in the US, Canada and Mexico.

Microsoft will let you control your smart home devices such as smart lights or smart thermometers.

A year on, Microsoft came to the game to challenge the Google Home, Amazon Echo in its second generation and it will have its supporters. Smart speakers with voice control are definitely happening and this looks like the first massive IoT revolution that has made it to millions of homes across the western world.

At this time, Amazon Echo is the most popular choice, as it will let you order stuff without even looking at your phone or PC. Now, is that a good thing? Currently on an Echo you can order a Porsche, if your credit card doesn't break the limit.

Netlab experts say the botnet is in its incipient stages of development, with its operator adding as many devices to the fold as possible.

Check Point and Netlab point out that IoT_reaper did not launch any DDoS attack, but Reaper comes with a Lua-based execution environment integrated into the malware that allows its operator to deliver modules for various tasks, such as DDoS attacks, traffic proxying, and other.

Reaper's Lua core also comes embedded with 100 DNS open resolvers, a functionality that will allow it to carry out DNS amplification attacks.

The FBI and Europol warned about the dangers of leaving Internet of Things devices exposed online, but the world does not seem particularly concerned that their lightbulbs could take part in an attack on the power grid.

For ages Intel has been banging on about the Internet of Things and how it will be the saviour of the chip business.

It seemed that Intel, having been too late to take advantage of the mobile boom, wanted to be in place when the Internet of the Things arrived.

However, Intel of late, appears to be withdrawing some of its enthusiasm. It is discontinuing its Galileo, Joule, and Edison lineups of development boards. The chip maker quietly made the announcement and now appears to be letting 130 people go from its IoT teams.

Intel plans to lay off 97 people at its corporate headquarters in Santa Clara and up to 40 more in Ireland as the chipmaker makes cuts to its Internet of Things group.

Intel's IoT group provided $721 million in revenue in the first quarter of the year, up nearly 11 percent from the prior year. But IoT accounted for less than five percent of Intel's sales.

Curiously, Intel hasn’t yet scrapped Curie, its platform for wearable devices. But given that the wearable market is at a standstill, it might not be long before Intel exits this market segment too.

But it is looking like Intel is falling back to its default PC/Server chips and has no plan to do anything else.

MediaTek today unveiled its first narrow band Internet of Things (NB-IoT) SoC.

Dubbed the MT2625, the chip is part of a collaboration with China Mobile to build the world's smallest NB-IoT module (16mm X 18mm) around the chipset.

MediaTek's new ultra-low-power MT2625 SoC supports a full frequency band (from 450MHz to 1.2GHz) of 3GPP R13 (NB1) and R14 (NB2) standards for a wide range of IoT applications including smart home control, logistics tracking and smart meters.

The tech is to solve a problem that existing cellular networks like 2G, 3G and 4G do not have the capacity to meet the needs of billions of IoT devices. However Low-Power Wide-Area (LPWA) networking was developed to accommodate the increased connectivity needs across the globe.

MediaTek has been a key player driving the formulation and implementation of the 3GPP LPWA specification for NB-IoT, which is designed to support large-scale connectivity, reduce equipment complexity and minimize power consumption to prolong battery life for years.

MediaTek Corporate Vice President and General Manager of the Home Entertainment Business Group Jerry Yu said that LPWA had the power to unleash the potential of the IoT, representing a huge market opportunity.

"MediaTek was the first in the industry to support the full frequency band of 3GPP NB-IoT standards, and we are committed to continuing to invest in NB-IoT technology to meet the global market demand. By providing highly integrated, low power and robust connectivity technologies over the years, along with full-featured IoT software and hardware development platforms, MediaTek aims to enable developers and device makers of all sizes to quickly bring to market innovative NB-IoT devices."

MT2625 is MediaTek's first NB-IoT chipset built to meet the requirements of cost-sensitive and small IoT devices. The highly integrated MT2625 combines an ARM Cortex-M microcontroller (MCU), pseudo-static RAM (PSRAM), flash memory and power management unit (PMU) into a small package to lower the cost of production while also speeding up time-to-market. The chip leverages

MediaTek's advanced power consumption technology will enable IoT devices to work with chargeable batteries for years.

I'm not too sure just which phrase sums up the internet of things (IoT). In these early days, perhaps it's the Wild West of legend or maybe it's like Sicily during the bad old days of the Mafia. Is it gunslinging or a quick shot to the back of the head by one of the families?

The whole question has become very real to me in the last few days since Currys sent me Google Home to review.

Let me first of all describe my own internet setup here in Oxford and that will give you some idea of my conundrum. Or is it a dilemma? You can ask Google H to define a conundrum. And a dilemma. Oh and sometimes it uses Britannica as a source and at other times Wikipedia. There's some kind of editorial judgment going on here but who is the editor, or team of editors? That is another Google puzzle. But as the lady says – and more of this later - “she is still learning”.

I run a fast Virgin Media broadband connection here with several devices depending on it, including a PC in the mancave at the end of my garden. I am a subscriber to Amazon Prime, have a Roku TV connected to the interweb and a smarty pants phone or two. I've also got Philips' Hue lighting upstairs, downstairs and in my mancave. This Google stuff doesn't half open up some braincells. But, let me tell you definitively, the Google robot does sometimes get it wrong. Yesterday I asked the lady of the house – that's Google Home - whether it would rain. She came back with a pretty firm “no”. So I walked four yards and stood outside the back door where it was pouring it down.

It took me a day or two to decide my attitude to the new lady in my house. At first I was talking to her in a rather nasty tone and sometimes shouting too. But I decided to be nice to robots – they're people too. Or some people are robots. The lines are getting blurred.

Right now, Google Home in the UK comes with only one voice, coming with received pronunciation. It would be nice if the future the designers could tweak the voice so that you could have, for example, a man or a woman speaking in a Brummy, Glaswegian or Cockney voice. A USA version now supports the ability for the machine to recognise up to six different voices – apparently we'll get that upgrade here soon enough.

There's a bit of a security problem too. A neighbour of mine, for example, managed to shout a command through my letterbox turning on a Barry Manilow album remotely – he's not my favourite artist. But once you've got music playing you do really need to shout to turn it off – she couldn't do that from outside my front door. I can imagine domestics too, where different members of a family override requests made by another.

There's another, and in my view, more serious security problem. My neighbour, the one who shouted through my letterbox and according to Google Home is only 26 feet from my house – by car. I don't use the car I don't have to sometimes go over there but if I do need to access the internet, she has given me a password for her wi-fi system. Because the security is so poor, so far, on this device it means that I can access her device, play music on her machine, access the requests she's made. Google really needs to address this problem.

And it would also be useful to be able to customise requests to the machine. Now, you have to start a request by saying “OK Google” or “Hey Google”. I'd like to say things like “Hi Darling”. Oh well maybe not.

It does feel strange talking to a machine at first, but these days, of course, it's very common to see people walking down the street apparently talking to themselves. When I was a kid, we used to think people like that were nutters. But everybody is a nutter in the 21st century.

The number of devices supported is really quite limited so far but include smart thermostats, lighting and other gizmos. I have a Roku system running on my TV, but Google doesn't support this and I expect it never will, considering that it sells its own TV system, Chromecast. Which is supported, surprise, surprise. While it supports Spotify, Google Play and Tune In, currently it only supports Youtube in the USA.

There are some other third party services available in the USA, but not here yet, according to the Google Home page.

Hue lighting systems are pretty expensive but I have several lights in my little house. It's neat to be able to turn upstairs lights on by simply saying, “OK Google, turn upstairs on”. Google Home is downstairs in my back room, but if you shout commands down the stairwell she does listen to you.

Some of the features are really pretty good. You can build a shopping list but, as yet, you can't delete it by voice command, only by using the app. And her recognition is a bit wobbly for some artists. She just couldn't handle Yves Montand nor Françoise Hardy – but the Spotify app on your smartphone is a good way to browse for the gazillions of titles available on the service.

She/He/It also does a pretty fair job translating into other languages, as far as we can tell. The same neighbour who shouted through my letterbox is pretty fluent in Italian and was happy with the results.

Setup

This is a piece of cake. You plug Home into a spare socket, and download the Home app for either your Android or IOS device. When you run the app, it prompts you to enter different details – for example your wi-fi connection. When you're done, you simply talk to the little blighter prefacing the request with either “OK Google” or “Hey Google”. Currently, Home supports both Spotify and Google Play – with Google enticing you to try a free subscription for the latter. If you want to use Spotify, you'll have to upgrade to its Premium service. That costs £10 a month.

Cost

The basic Google Home system costs £129 in the UK. But if you want to customise your gizmo by, for example, having a purple colour base, you can spend an extra £18 or so to do just that. Buying a system including Hue lighting, a smart TV, Chromecast and so on will cost you a pretty penny.

Conclusion

Google Home is a bright idea but there are some problems. Why, for example, does it not have access to the full search facilities of Google itself? For example, if you search for a person using a browser you get a wide range of results – but Home appears only to come up with Wikipedia and occasionally Brittanica results. Narrowing things down is a little bit tricky unless you're confining yourself to running your Hue lights or finding out the weather rather than just looking out of the window. Google hasn't migrated all the services to UK customers that it offers in the US, but perhaps when that happens the search facilities will be better. Oh, and the faster your internet connection, the better...

One of the darker aspects of the Internet of Things is that it places yourself totally at the mercy of companies which believe you have to do what they say and accept whatever poor service they offer.

This week a bloke called R. Martin reported problems with the iPhone application that controls Garadget which opens his garage door.

He left an angry comment on the Garadget community board: "Just installed and attempting to register a door when the app started doing this. Have uninstalled and reinstalled iPhone app, powered phone off/on - wondering what kind of piece of shit I just purchased here..."

When Garadget had not replied he left a one star review of Garadget on Amazon: "Junk - DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY - iPhone app is a piece of junk, crashes constantly, start-up company that obviously has not performed proper quality assurance tests on their products."

Garadget did actually reply. It bricked the product remotely. It posted on the support forum: "Martin, The abusive language here and in your negative Amazon review, submitted minutes after experiencing a technical difficulty, only demonstrates your poor impulse control. I'm happy to provide the technical support to the customers on my Saturday night but I'm not going to tolerate any tantrums. At this time your only option is return Garadget to Amazon for refund. Your unit ID 2f0036... will be denied server connection."

After all that is the way to handle a customer complaint with the minimum amount of fuss and not draw attention to your company or products’ problems.

Denis Grisak, who founded the company called SoftComplex to launch Garadget, a device built using Wi-Fi-based cloud connectivity from Particle must have thought he was onto a winner when he launched the product on Indiegogo earlier this year, hitting 209 percent of his launch goal in February.

Now it seems that because they handled only one complaint in this particular way, they are getting the sort of publicity that it really did not want.

Later this year, Qualcomm plans to release Android Things for its Snapdragon 210 mobile processor and the first demonstrations are expected to take place next week during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Android Things is Google’s simplified, embedded version of Android for Internet of Things (IoT) devices and was announced at its I/O conference in 2015. Aimed primarily at low-power, low memory devices with as much as 32 to 64GB of onboard RAM, the platform intends to be a substitute for the much heavier Linux-based Android OS. It basically allows small IoT devices to handle basic connectivity tasks while communicating over a lightweight SDK called Weave. The protocol gives administrators the ability to monitor real-time device statistics and activations, test device functionality, and command device usage using the company’s graphical IoT Developer Console.

Google's IoT developer console

The first early builds were released in December as developer previews though were only compatible with a handful of devices, including the Intel Edison, Intel Joule, NXP Pico and Raspberry Pi 3. Though the Snapdragon 210 SoC was announced in September 2014, it contains an integrated X5 LTE modem (150Mbps down, 50Mbps up) with carrier aggregation, something which the other development boards do not.

The benefit of using Android Things, at least for Android users, is that it makes use of tools developers are already familiar with, including Android Studio, Google Play Services and Google Cloud Platform. There are a few known problems with the initial Android Things preview build, though Google says it will be releasing an update in the coming months that includes a framework for pushing out regular OS updates. This includes an update to the Weave communication protocol that will add compatibility for Google Assistant.

While other smart home frameworks including Samsung SmartThings and Philips Hue already work with Weave, other manufacturers including Belkin, Honeywell and TP-Link are currently in the process of implementing it as well.

While most notebook brand vendors expect the notebook industry to grow steadily in 2017 as a result of increases in shipments, at least one ODM vendor is claiming that the proliferation of more feature-rich smartphones, tablets and other handheld devices is still a good reason to consider otherwise.

Lin’s company Wiston is currently the third-largest ODM notebook vendor worldwide and managed to ship 19.4 million units in 2016. Even with a respectable increase in annual shipments and a global increase in on-year industry sales for the first time since 2012, the chairman says dangerous times remain ahead for an industry that has made little major advancement for a long period of time.

While admitting that stagnation is mainly the result of an industry led solely by developments from Microsoft and Intel, he says that notebooks will be replaced by other fast-growing mobile handheld devices as well as “broadly defined IoT devices”.

A shrinking PC market brings further concentration of brands

“The fact the PC market is shrinking is not a secret. The process will bring about further concentration of brands, and in turn suppliers,” Lin said, adding that related suppliers such as Wistron should begin shifting focus to other form factors such as smartphones and IoT devices.

Global notebook shipments dropped below 150 million units in 2016 and are expected to fall slightly in 2017, according to DigiTimes Research. The three major players – Lenovo, HP and Dell – have all maintained their market shares over the past three years, though in the process have acquired share from the other two leading vendors ASUS and Acer.

AMD Ryzen may bring notebook market much needed relief in 2H 2017

While sources have noted that the notebook industry began a slow process of rebounding in the second half of 2016, most of it was driven by the need to push out low inventory levels from supply channels.

What Lin and others have not mentioned is the incoming competition from AMD, which is preparing to ship its first Zen-based Ryzen desktop products this quarter, followed by server parts and then notebook parts later this year. For the past four years, Intel has struggled to produce significant instructions-per-clock performance as it switches to a more extended product release cycle that resulted from a yield slowdown for smaller process nodes. With at least one major competitor looking to bring performance back into the notebook market, the options for consumers will likely expand as SKUs are offered with trade-offs on price-to-weight, battery life and feature flexibility that were not previously available under an Intel-dominated market.

ODMs currently face tough choices for orders

According to DigiTimes Research, most original design manufacturers (ODMs) are facing challenges choosing which vendors to receive orders from as they deal with a smaller amount of options from the tighter concentration of brands. While ASUS and Asustek have both participated in RFQs (request for quotation) for notebooks orders in 2017, other brand vendors are still considering when and how much they should reduce overall revenue reliance on notebook sales.